Alice Greeley Dewey (December 4, 1928 – June 11, 2017) was an American anthropologist who studied Javanese society. She was a professor of anthropology at the

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa The University of Hawaii at Mānoa (University of Hawaii—Mānoa, UH Mānoa, Hawai'i, or simply UH) is a public land-grant research university in Mānoa, a neighborhood in Honolulu, Hawaii. It is the flagship campus of the University of Haw ...

from 1962 until her retirement in 2005. Among her doctoral students was

Ann Dunham Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995) was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She is the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the Uni ...

, the mother of President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

Biography

Dewey was born in 1928 to Sabino L. Dewey and Edith Elizabeth Greeley. Her father was born in Italy as Sabino Piro Levis and was adopted as a child by the philosopher John Dewey and his wife Alice. She grew up in Huntington, New York and during high school worked at the laboratory now known as

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is one of 68 institutions supported by the Cancer Centers ...

. Dewey attended Radcliffe College of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, where she became interested in cultural anthropology. After completing her

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

degree in 1950, she continued her study of anthropology at Radcliffe, earning her

M.A. A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

degree in 1955 and her

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in 1959. She conducted field research in east central

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

from 1952 to 1954, joining in the Modjokuto Project with

Ph.D. candidates Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, Robert Jay, Donald Fagg, and Edward Ryan. Members of the research team studied different aspects of contemporary social life in the town of

Pare Pare may refer to: People with the name * Emmett Paré (1907-1973), tennis player * Pare, former member of Kotak, an Indonesian band * Pare Lorentz (1905-1992), American film director * Richard Pare (born 1948), English photographer * Paré, a ...

East Java East Java ( id, Jawa Timur) is a Provinces of Indonesia, province of Indonesia located in the easternmost hemisphere of Java island. It has a land border only with the province of Central Java to the west; the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean bord ...

, known pseudonymously in their publications as Modjokuto. Dewey's research subject was rural markets, and her dissertation was published as a monograph in 1962 under the title ''Peasant Marketing in Java''. Dewey joined the faculty of the

Department of Anthropology in 1962. She served as the dissertation adviser for many doctoral students, most notably

's mother

, who entered the graduate program in 1972 after having lived in Indonesia with her second husband Lolo Soetoro for five years. Dunham's application to the program caught the attention of Dewey because of her experience in Indonesia and her interest in the production of handicrafts there. Dunham completed coursework for her M.A. in anthropology in 1974, and the following year returned to Indonesia for her dissertation fieldwork on peasant blacksmithing in

Yogyakarta Yogyakarta (; jv, ꦔꦪꦺꦴꦒꦾꦏꦂꦠ ; pey, Jogjakarta) is the capital city of Special Region of Yogyakarta in Indonesia, in the south-central part of the island of Java. As the only Indonesian royal city still ruled by a monarchy, ...

. Dunham was formally granted her M.A. in 1986 and her Ph.D. in 1992, under Dewey's supervision. reprinted by: After Dunham's death in 1995, Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper edited her dissertation for publication, which appeared in 2009 as ''Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia''. In addition to her fieldwork in Java, Dewey also studied the

Māori people The Māori (, ) are the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand (). Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350. Over several c ...

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

and the Javanese community in New Caledonia. She retired in 2005. She died on June 11, 2017 in

Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...

after suffering a stroke.

References

External links

Faculty page, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dewey, Alice G. 1928 births 2017 deaths American anthropologists American women anthropologists Javanists People from Huntington, New York Radcliffe College alumni University of Hawaiʻi faculty American women academics 21st-century American women